Archive | October, 2010

Some thoughts on Social CRM

October 29, 2010 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

Yesterday I did a presentation on Social CRM at Digital Marketing First (and no my thoughts on that event haven’t changed yet). It was our partner Selligent who had asked me to join them for this presentation and the following is what I prepared.

The original call for the presentation was around social media as a direct marketing tool but I found that too limited of scope and also I’m annoyed by the fact that many people just see social crm as a campaigning tool on Facebook and Twitter. But hey, nothing new there – online crm is also mostly translated as being sending emails to a database. While clearly crm is much more than that. And that’s kind of what I wanted to bring in this presentation to begin with.

‘The customer is at the centre of everything we do’. Customer centricity is a hot topic these days, it’s the primary scope for how we manage our business. But is that really so? I’m not too sure about that. From what I see and hear businesses seem to have quite a few other objectives that come first. Do we even know our customers? Because how can we even be real about being customer centric if you have no clue who you’re talking about?

In an age in which consumers constantly re-evaluate brands/products (cfr McKinsey) it’s even more important to put the consumer that the center (and for real) and to start building relationships. So the point in the end is to use a lot more of the tools/channels to get to know your customer a lot better so you can be more personal in the conversation. And luckily there’s an awful lot of automation that can be done to deliver on that promise.

For those that attended the presentation, hope you liked it.

ageofconversation, community, consumer, duvalguillaume, marketing, presentation, research, social media, strategy
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When augmentation is about reducing (Pt. 2)

October 22, 2010 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

In February of this year I wrote a post about Kevin Slavin’s talk on Augmented Reality at PICNIC NY Salon. In that video he talked about something that made total sense to me… which to be honest is true for most of what Kevin says anyway :)

“His thoughts around augmented cities and why maybe ‘augmented’ should be about taking things away instead of just adding them to the world as we are already drowning in data as it is.”

So when I got this video today from a colleague about a research project on ‘Dimished Reality’ by Jan Herling and Wolfgang Broll of the  Ilmenau University of Technology, it was like a proof of the concept Kevin talked about a year ago now. I don’t like the name ‘Dimished Reality’ because it still is doing more on top of what is really there. But in this case less really is more, check it out:

beta, creativity, electronics, inspiration, research, technology, tracking, video
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The future belongs to the geeks…

October 19, 2010 by Kris Hoet 2 Comments

Nobody else wants it.

This is without a doubt one (of many) personal favorites out of all the cartoons Hugh MacLeod has created in the past x years.

thefuturebelongs219

I think there’s a lot of simple truth in this one. Every day/week/month I see innovation that impacts the business I am in and which found its origin in technology, software development or something like it. And then I’m not only talking about pure technology innovation but also about innovation of business processes, creative thinking, etc.

An obvious one is about how technology is driving change in the media landscape. And then especially when you think about how long existing ‘traditional’ media are transforming, not just the new media that gets added. Particularly the interactive tv experience is something that fascinates me a lot recently. In this domain several big players are active – television manufacturers, service providers, content networks, … – and yet somehow I believe the main innovation will come from outside, from a few geeks in the corner that will really create a richer tv experience using a tablet device or whatever. They can think without bounderies of current business processes, revenue management, … no old business models to try to protect. There’s a lot of cool stuff out there already.

Another recent example of technology driving change, and this time in business thinking is Agile Strategic Planning, really interesting stuff if you ask me. This whole idea is an answer to changing consumer/brand needs but is based on a concept that has been used (by some) in software development for almost 10 years now. Neil Perkin used the following quote in a recent post while trying to explain the need for this agile thinking:

"Our structures need to be more speedy. Speed used to kill now lack of speed kills. Lets have organizations that can iterate quickly and empower its folks to make decisions. Percolating decisions up and down an organization makes little sense"

Agile strategic development, adaptive marketing, lean planning, … all terms that highlight more or less the same thing. We have to start thinking in ways that allow for much more iterations and changes while the process is ongoing. A new kind of strategic planning that is heavily influenced by concepts developed in software development.

Just 2 examples in my area of interest that came to mind when I saw this cartoon again. But yeah, the future belongs to the geeks, I’m sure of that.

creativity, inspiration, quote, strategy, technology
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Check out Alfa Romeo’s MiToManiacs

October 4, 2010 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

Last week we launched a new campaign for Alfa Romeo: MiToManiacs as part of the Alfa MiTo launch. MiToManiacs is a nonstop race that will take you from site to site via banners. The best and fastest banner-racer will actually win a real Alfa MiTo.

mitomaiancs2

And like all good games, there are some shortcuts built in. Depending on the co-driver you chose, you can unlock some shortcuts. I’ll give you one, in the scene above you can actually follow a different way to avoid being annoyed by the octopus.

Game on! I’ll tell you, you will need some practice and find those shortcuts if you want to get into the top 10.

Thanks to the people from Clint.be for the collaboration on this one.

advertising, belgium, duvalguillaume, games, inspiration, internet, racing
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Reading white papers on the iPad (Evolved)

October 1, 2010 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

I recently figured out a nice way to read white papers on the iPad and thus finally catch up to the reading of all those white papers. It was/is a good solution but there are 2 elements that could be improved:

  1. Would have been nice to be able to open the PDF’s in iBooks straight from Dropbox without having to open them in Dropbox first and then in iBooks. Minor issue but could be easier.
  2. You can bookmark pages in iBooks on the iPad but that’s pretty much all the interaction that’s possible. It could have been better if you could make all kinds of annotations on the document, like notes or highlights etc.

And well what do you know, I just found out there’s a solution for that called GoodReader, a relatively new app for the iPad. It doesn’t look half as good as iBooks where you get that nice view of all your document covers on those shelves… but you can sync with your Dropbox folder from within the app and you can make all kinds of annotations on the document which you can save separately as annotations or immediately within the document. Sounds like a winner to me.

Check it out.

electronics, research, software
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